SHE TAKES ’EM ABOARD GREEN
When the November winds began to show their temper, blowing strong from the west and north, the Corsair had a foretaste of what the winter service would be like. There happened to be no one aboard who took the trouble to set down on paper, in diaries or letters home, just what the life was in the crowded compartments below decks when the ship was bucking and rolling five hundred miles offshore and the combers toppled green over the bows. In the Reid destroyer, however, was a young lawyer from Wisconsin, Timothy Brown, who was not only a very able seaman, but also something of an artist with a pen, and he managed to convey very adequately what all these young mariners put up with in order to make the seas safe for democracy. Almost word for word, he might have been writing of the Corsair:
A wave suddenly lifted us and I went down on my right hip, sustaining severe contusions and abrasions, not to mention a general shaking up. Our chief pharmacist’s mate rushed up with a tourniquet, iodiform gauze, and sticking plaster and asked me what I needed worst. Thanking him, I made my way below and moored to a stanchion for chow. I call attention to the stanchions because our tureens, containing food and silverware, were hitched to them while the rest of the food was in aluminum platters which the mess cooks surrounded as best they could with their feet and knees. Occasionally a platter would get away from our inexperienced mess cook of the Reserve Force and he would dive across the compartment to nab it, only to lose other dishes which he was safeguarding. The hungry sailors would assemble the chow again, whereupon each man would help himself and eat under whatever endurable circumstances he could find.
Gentle reader, imagine yourself perched upon a camp-stool with your face to port and your back to starboard, at the seamen’s dining-table, trying to steer a bowl of soup safely into your face. The ship rolls forty-five degrees and your stool and soup bowl begin to slide at the same time. You hold the edge of the table with your left hand, clamp your spoon down hard into the bottom of the bowl to secure it, then cautiously push yourself to your feet, for the stool threatens to carry you across the compartment in a jiffy. The angle of the bowl now being constant with the relation it bears to the table, the angle described by the ship’s lurch spills half your soup. You quickly release your grip on the table edge and take the soup in both hands to steady it. This leaves the soup suspended perfectly between zenith and nadir, fixed in its relation to the bowl, if you don’t weaken. Your spoon and slice of bread have been sliding all over the table, kept from hitting the wet deck only by a wooden flange. Before you can plan a campaign to absorb the soup, your feet begin to slip and ere you can blink an eye you have slid four yards across to the starboard mess table, your feet tangled with a stool, and you bump into a shipmate who turns loose his own soup so that it fits perfectly down the back of your neck.
The other day a tureen of canned salmon skidded off a near-by locker and landed under the starboard table. The mess cook plunged after it, but missed it by a hair. The tureen bounded into the lap of our Irish oiler, who shouted gleefully, as he clutched it with both hands, “I’ve got the bloody thing.” I was reminded of a fat football player receiving the ball on the kick-off in his centre of gravity and not knowing what to do with it. The ship’s swing back upset our hero and the salmon slipped away from him, landing on the locker of a gunner’s mate and spoiling a brand-new suit of liberty blues.
I had the misfortune, at this sad moment, to let a ration of stew get away from me to the deck. There was no use in staying below to hear the mess cook rave, so I seized a cold potato between my teeth and followed it madly all the way to the chart-house where I feasted in peace. I was thankful to be alive, thankful that I had a slippery deck to skate on, a speaking-tube to cling to, and an oilskin coat which fitted so snugly about my neck that not more than a quart of briny water seeped into it every time our good ship did a courtesy to the waves. Only a third arm could have made me happier. Every sailor needs one in his business.
The deck continued to be a sort of good-natured joggling board which playfully teased you, smashed you, and tried to exterminate you. In another hour I had contracted decorations on my knees that stuck out like hens’ eggs, slivers of skin had been peeled off my shins, and pains of various kinds convinced me that, although my heart, lungs, and diaphragm were still working, they had shifted from their accustomed places. I had grown so feeble from underfeeding and excitement that you could have knocked me flat with a dried herring. It would have been an advantage to go below and try to sleep, but the ship was as unsteady down there and the stifling air was not tempting.
When it was time to go below, a sudden encounter with a wave sent me to my hands and knees. Bethlehem steel is hard, so I crawled the distance to the ladder and fell to the quarter-deck, then fell down the other ladder to the head of my bunk. Only one light was burning and it was all wrapped up in black cotton socks so the submarines couldn’t see us. I groped my way into the bunk and removed my shoes, this being an old custom with sailors, to rest the feet. Then I stretched out and was ready for a few hours of slumber. However, the waves continued to pound us and made the night hideous. The machinery creaked and groaned and a leaky steam-pipe kept whistling like a peanut roaster. To stay in my bunk it was necessary to run my arms beneath an elastic strap that goes over the middle of the mattress and under the metal frame.
In this position I remained doggedly silent until midnight when our watch was called again. I was so sleepy that I remembered little of what happened during the next four hours, except that at the end of it I noticed a radio man swinging around a smokestack in an effort to snag our flying wireless apparatus and put it to rights again. After two or three hours more of misery in the bunk, breakfast time came, with beans and loaf bread on the menu, and I felt sure that I would be lucky if I could stomach a single bean. Beans didn’t look a bit good to me, yet I was forced to eat something or I couldn’t stand another watch.